How music lessons may strengthen verbal skills. The brain processes both verbal and musical tasks in the same brain region.
By
Thomas Sexton, published on November 01, 2003 - last reviewed on October 03, 2007
Those violin lessons might not lead your child to Juilliard, but
they could boost his verbal SAT scores. According to a study,
children with consistent music training have better verbal memories than
those who don’t play an instrument, and the advantage seems to
endure even after they quit their lessons.
Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90
boys ages 6 to 15. Of the group, half had music training both from
individual lessons and from participating in their school’s string
orchestra. The other half had no musical training. When tested for verbal
memory, the young musicians performed significantly better than their
nonmusical peers.
In a follow-up memory test, researchers found that
students who had discontinued their music training still scored better on
verbal tests than those who had never taken music lessons in the first
place. But the musicians’ verbal skills appeared to level off after
they discontinued the lessons. Researchers believe the relationship may
be due to the involvement of the brain’s left temporal lobe in both
verbal and musical tasks.
The study was published in the journal Neuropsychology.
